When it comes to the spicier cultural issues that generate flame wars online, I tend to find myself falling on the side of the conservatives. The exceptions to this are LGBT rights and drug use, but these days, these issues seem to divide more on old/young lines than conservative/liberal lines anyway.
I'm strongly against all forms of gun control. I believe that nations often have the responsibility to get involved in the affairs of other nations, including militarily. My diet consists mostly of red meat and I have a longstanding beef with vegans. I find media that overtly panders to minorities irritating whether or not I'm in said minority. I believe that wealthy liberals are intentionally and maliciously fanning the flames of race and gender conflicts to break down community bonds to make people easier to manipulate. Yadda yadda.
In short, when it comes to cultural views, I'm a milquetoast example of exactly what you'd expect to find from a young, online, cultural conservative, or at least libertarian.
And yet, despite all of this, I'm a Socialist. Not a Socialist-lite or Social Democrat in the vein of Bernie Sanders, but a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist.
I believe corporations are fundamentally evil to the core. I believe the overwhelming majority of working people in the US (and probably the world) are being ruthlessly exploited by a class of nobles we'd all be better off without. As a result, I believe we have an ethical responsibility to favor trade unions, strikes, and literally anything that protects workers from corporations. I believe the only realistic long-term result of unchecked Capitalism with rapidly improving technology is a dystopia. Yadda yadda.
Now, neither my cultural beliefs nor my economic beliefs are particularly unusual. The proportion of people in the US identifying as an Economic Leftists or Socialists has gone up every year since 1989, and the cultural conservatives, reactionaries, anti-progs, and anti-woke types are growing rapidly as well. Yet, I've never met anyone else in the overlap.
The combination of cultural Conservatism and economic Socialism is what's historically been called Populism, so that's how I'll be using that word. (I'm clarifying this because some people call Trump a "populist", but he's about as anti-socialist as someone can be, so I'm not using that word the same way as these people.)
Looking to the past, I can see lots of examples of this kind of Populism, especially in the first half of the 20th century, but practically nothing in the present. Libertarians are culturally liberal and economically conservative, and there's loads of them, so you'd think the opposite would also be true, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
With this in mind, I have 3 questions for this community:
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Why are there drastically fewer Populists today than there were in the past?
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Besides "Populist", what are some other names for the belief system I'm describing?
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Where are all the Populists that are left? I assume there's not literally zero, and that some of them hang out online together somewhere, so where are they? Are there populist blogs? Populist forums? Populist subreddits?
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Notes -
"Owned by everyone who works there" is probably not the best way I could have phrased it. What I'm picturing looks something like this, quoted from another comment:
Suppose you live in a town of 10000 people and you and 30 buddies believe that your town would be better off with a power plant.
In a Captialist economy, you'd all go to a wealthy investor and try to convince him of your hypothetical plant's ability to make him a lot of money if he invests in it. If you succeed, he'd fund your plant in exchange for most of the profits. This could be described as an investor-owned business.
In a Socialized economy, you'd all go to the town council to convince them that the plant would be a net positive for the town. The council would hold a vote of the entire town. If the vote passed, the town would fund your plant in exchange for a cut of the profits, which would be distributed to the people, either directly or through infrastructure. This would be a collective-owned (government-owned) business.
The advantage of this over an investor-owned business is that it scales better with automation. Suppose that the plant initially hires 50 people from the town. Then suppose, as is common, that improvements in technology enable the plant to be only manned by 10 people. Then suppose that all other businesses in the town do the same thing.
Under Capitalism, this would be good for the wealthy investor, and very bad for the town, as now most of the workers have been laid off and no longer benefit from the plant.
Whereas under Socialism, automation would be good for the town. Since everyone shares in the profits of the plant, everyone would benefit from improvements to the plant's productivity.
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Does everyone share in the losses as well? How good is the town's judgment?
If it's bad, do the residents become destitute after they spend their efforts on a doomed venture? If not, who is bailing them out?
If it's great, can they leverage it beyond their own borders? Would they even care to put in the effort if the benefits go to other people?
Also, that seems incredibly unstable or else totalitarian.
Imagine that someone wants to start a new business, and applies to the town. The town declines, so they decide to go it alone (Maybe it's capital-light like a sole-proprietorship hairdresser run from home. Maybe they can get money from elsewhere.) Does the town take the profits as if they had invested? If they don't, they'll be pushed into irrelevance unless they are the best judges of value in the entire market. If they do, they're hardly better than common thieves.
Indirectly, sure. A portion of their tax money is going to fund a venture in the hopes that the venture will make money for the town. If that venture fails to do so, they're not getting that money back. That sucks, but in most places I've lived, the chance of earning any profit from your tax revenue is effectively zero, and I'd rather be taking a calculated risk than a guaranteed loss.
If the whole town is insane enough to spend the entire town's budget on a single venture, sure, but there's not much point in discussing economics if we can't assume at least semi-rational actors.
No? Why would they? If I don't invest in Apple, I don't get profits from Apple. That makes no sense.
Then they won't be relevant for some businesses, which is fine. The point of this whole thing is to prevent too much power from being in the hands of a couple of rich investors, not to stop people who don't need investors in the first place. I'm not talking about flower shops and barbers, I'm talking about the kinds of industries you couldn't possibly start without an investor, hence the power plant example.
The solution seems incredibly simple: Don't tax away that money.
I was assuming they could still use normal financial strategies like loans, and would therefore be exposed to risk in excess of their investment. Regardless, the same effect could happen if they ended up with a net liability instead of an asset (like an environmentally-damaged site that required cleanup).
If they're financing everything with cash-on-hand, then how could they ever get anything done? Here's a small, true (slightly altered for privacy) story: A factory in my hometown shut down, and some local people banded together and bought it. If it had been purchased with cash split evenly by all the town's residents, it would be $10k each.
that was a textbook-perfect opportunity for your proposed system, but I don't see how it could happen. Is the town sitting on a $10 million war chest in case something interesting comes up? Do they levy a special tax and hope that everyone has savings? We know that they aren't going to outside lenders because that would expose the town to excess risk.
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